A boozy bank holiday post into this section.
Seconds Out is the best live album. Its just ‘the best’ live album. Period! Name a live album with musicians that can trump this level of genius!?
I prefer Seconds Out live renditions of Cinema Show and Firth of Fifth in comparison to the studio tracks on Selling England By the Pound. The fact that they can deliver this live is just immense.
Have a great bank holiday everyone!
Thanks, yes I agree. One of the great live albums. I prefer the live versions of those tracks too!
Well, there’s the Steve Hackett concert - Genesis Revisited Live: Seconds Out & More on Bluray, which is rather superb 
You could check out Magenta’s We are Seven: Live 2018. A great albumn with sound quality better then most studio albums.
The “best”??
I presume you mean the best Genesis live album.
Otherwise, where would one start?
Agreed again! I enjoy all of these Steve Hackett albums. I think he has the balance just right and his band’s performances of all the Genesis material is top notch, the classic songs and also tracks you didn’t get live back in the day such as ‘Can Utility and the Coastliners’ and of course ‘Blood on the Rooftops’!
Quoted from comments on Yootoob.
“This song sums all up the 70’s progressive rock in less than 5 minutes”
Can’t argue with that. Always been my favourite track from Foxtrot.
Did they mean that in a positive way or the sneering way of somebody who just doesn’t understand the 70s?
@joy_boy I think you’ve pulled the pin on this grenade of a conversation. There’s a LOT of really great live material. Seconds Out is one of my absolute favourites and the second album I bought (and the album I’ve bought the most since) but the other posts on here are not wrong. If I venture into the back catalogues of Yes, Peter Gabriel, Supertramp, Rush or even Genesis themselves (sticking broadly with the genre) there’s a lot of competition and then if I think about the names already set out by others and add John Lee Hooker, BB King, The Beatles, Depeche Mode and countless others to the mix….well you can see where I’m going 
Good point. Dunno.
Curiously, Seconds Out is one of the very few Genesis albums that I don’t have, either CD or LP………I’d better rectify that; forward to AMZ, my man, and don’t spare the horses!
Genesis, Seconds Out, is up there, though poorly recorded.
I also love ELP’s Welcome Back My Friends, in its remixed form.
And Jethro Tull, Live–Bursting Out.
But THE greatest live album is of course Rory Gallagher, Irish Tour '74…
I saw them in Earls Court around the Seconds Out period. Not sure if it was the same tour but the arrangements and medleys were the same. I have the 3 CD version with the bonus tracks. I characterise it as good but a bit thin sound wise. I suppose it depends on the playback system and how the listener likes their music presented.
The best live album from that time IMO is Mike Oldfield’s Exposed. Spacious, dynamic, and with a sense of the venue’s acoustic. Second place goes to Dr Feelgood’s Stupidity for the recording quality in the context of their comparatively simple and lashed up rig, and the fact that I was present at the Southend recordings.
There are probably many more great live albums I’ve never heard than ones I know.
(Edit: and having just posted and glanced at the post above mine, yes Bursting Out is also a cracker. It would come a in third place for me but for sound quality alone, it comes second.)
Really? I have an original ‘fat boy’ case double cd (now ripped) which sounds really good.
G
That was always my impression of the LP and CD I bought ‘in period’. More recently I bought the heavy weight vinyl ‘improved’ recording and the first thing I noticed was the baseline. This version of the album is no longer ‘thin’ compared to the original.
I think that in the 1970s vinyl era (which is when I bought them) Rutherford’s bass input was under delivered by the LPs. The first early CD version I heard of Nursery Cryme had me sitting up and realising that he wasn’t just thruming along. In many respects the CD sounded awful (like many CDs did at the time) but not in the bass portrayal.
You might revise your opinion if you listened to the Abbey Road Half Speed Remaster.
Nowt wrong with the recording my friend. 
When I played my original SO for the first time on the Rega P8 I was amazed how good it sounded with real bass kick. Now Yessongs, on the other hand, is surely one of the worst recorded live albums of any era, which is a shame given just how great the music is.
Yessongs is a truly dreadful recording on vinyl, CD or streaming but it captures the energy they intended for that music at the time it was written and it is peak 70s/peak prog so I still listen to it. The later live albums are great, but they are that fraction more mellow which means they lose the edge, that 70s zeitgeist.
I just recently picked up a 2nd hand Japanese vinyl version from 1986 and it sounds really good. In a couple of places it maybe sounds a treble-y but then it booms in. Very nice
Poorly pressed in the 1970s then.
This thread caused me to buy the half speed remaster of Seconds Out. Love it.